Assembling the Project Plan

The evolving nature of a project plan

The project plan is a living document that goes through multiple phases during the life of the project. In the beginning, it is strictly a plan—it marks the planned path to get from these early stages to the end. However, as the project begins, it will start capturing real-time data called actuals: actual start date, actual completion date, as well as actual resourcing. For now, we’ll focus on the early version of the project plan because this form of the plan is what leads to later versions.

There are a few key pieces of data that we need to gather for any project. Aside from the standards (task description, duration, and predecessors), we’ll want to capture the ...